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Hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection in a pregnant woman poses a serious risk to her infant at birth. Without postexposure immunoprophylaxis, approximately 40% of infants born to HBV-infected mothers in the United States will develop chronic HBV infection, approximately one-fourth of whom will eventually die from chronic liver disease.

The National Quality Forum (NQF) has endorsed the CDC NQF Perinatal Measure 0475 “Hepatitis B Vaccine Coverage Among All Live Newborn Infants Prior to Hospital or Birthing Facility Discharge.” This measure was 1 of 14 measures formally endorsed by the NQF Board of Directors on April 2, 2012. Measure 0475 can be found on the NQF website and was updated there on April 2, 2014 with e-specification for calculation of the measure, which can also be found on the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s website.

As a quality indicator, each hospital/birthing facility is encouraged to measure the rate of administration of the first dose of hepatitis B vaccine prior to discharge among all live infants born in their hospital/birthing facility during a specific time period (usually one calendar year). Hospitals are asked to exclude infants whose parents refused vaccination. Please find below documents outlining the specifications for the measure and an appendix of the ICD-9 codes and ICD-10 codes that might be used to calculate the hepatitis B birth dose coverage rate.NQF #0475 [PDF – 3 pages]AppendixA [PDF – 2 pages]

Educational Slide Presentations

This slide presentation is audio-visual educational tool that describes the importance of getting babies vaccinated against hepatitis B if a mother has hepatitis B infection. The 13 page slide set uses simple language and has audio in: Mandarin Chinese, Hmong, Korean, and Vietnamese, as well as English. Tagalog, in the form of Taglish, is available in a written format only.

This slide presentation is a 24 page illustrated educational tool for pregnant women who have hepatitis B. The slide presentation explains the importance of getting babies vaccinated against hepatitis B to prevent transmission of the disease. The text is in easy to understand English, and is also available in Spanish.